Chester L. Quarles is a professor of criminal justice and serves in the department of legal studies at the University of Mississippi. While serving as a state criminal investigator, director of the State Crime Laboratory and as the state ballistics examiner, he participated in the investigations of almost all KKK activity in Mississippi in the mid to late 1960s, testifying in court during the trial of the first KKK member convicted since Reconstruction. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.